Which came first: Stupid or Doll of Stupid?
By Gina Spadafori
February 7, 2010
Point of fact: I have always hated Barbie.
I hated that you couldn’t do anything with her but stand her up to look pretty, and that playing make-believe with her was about as interesting as playing with a pointy-headed stick. (Which may actually be all that Barbie really is, anyway.) And that was before I got old enough to figure out that she didn’t look like anyone ever has or could without bulimia and plastic surgery. Or before I got older still, and realized that the standard set for large, high and surgically augmented racks on women young and old and the accompanying fetish for the kinds of shoes that would be considered abuse if forced on us by law meant that there are a whole lot of women looking — or trying to look — like idiotsBarbies instead of, you know, women.
No, the Barbie or two that came my way was ignored (but at least not tortured, which still creeps me out). For me, Breyer horses, all the way. Before you could buy accessories for them, I made my own: String halters, tissue-paper blankets and felt saddles, all lovingly preserved by my mother. (OK, honestly: Tossed in a box and forgotten for decades until my mom told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to get my stupid plastic horses and other childhood debris out of her garage.)
When my niece went through her very brief Barbie stage at age 8 or so, her parents dutifully threw her a Barbie-themed birthday party. I was chided and considered a Bad Sport for refusing to support that crap, and brought her a Breyer, which I continued to do pretty routinely for the next decade.
My smart and beautiful niece is an equine studies major now, a witty three-sport athlete who can lift hay bales and saddles, back a horse-trailer into a parking space sized for a compact car and is more than woman enough to wear a strapless short sundress and drag the eyes of a couple hundred men off the finish line at the Del Mar race track with a flip of her hair. She rode her horse to pick up her high school diploma, the day after graduation ceremonies.
She is an action figure, not a Barbie.
So what does this have to do with pets? Turns out my Barbie hate and my intense dislike for the Paris Hilton tiny-puppy-mill-dog-as-fashion-accessory craze have dovetailed neatly, if rather depressingly, into a Barbie that comes complete not only with the standard Barbie idiocy, but also with fashion accessory plastic puppies.
No, they didn’t name it Puppy Mill Barbie, which would have been far more accurate, of course. The model is Barbie® Potty Training PupsTM, yours for around $20 in your nearest big-box China crap retail outlet.
Puppy Mill Barbie comes with three purse-sized puppy mill dogs, toys, dishes and “papers” for “potty-training” — although the word on the street is that the puppies leak from the wrong places, probably from some puppy-mill caused illness.
For anyone tempted to get a toddler indoctrinated into the cult of idiocyBarbie early, please note that Puppy Mill Barbie is not suitable for girls under 3, because the small parts may be a “choking hazard.”
I can attest to that. I’ve been choking on the vomit in my mouth from the very second I laid eyes on the thing.





